First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (17 page)

The Bergedorf observatory was immensely proud of its new telescope. But when
der Optiker
offered to build Schmidt telescopes for other observatories, nobody wanted one. He lowered his price to a pathetic sum. No other observatory in Europe would touch his camera, the fastest telescope on earth.
Der Optiker
grew loud and resentful in the taverns of Bergedorf. When he had taken a lot of brandy and had become what he called drunk
“auf Achse”
(“drunk to the axle-shaft”), he would order a round for the house and proclaim, “The whole world is going to hear of Schmidt someday!”

The 1930s in Germany were not a good time or place for a one-armed Estonian with a criminal record for pacifism. Schmidt smelled another war coming, which made him extremely angry, and so he contrived a method to escape the war: he began to thoroughly rinse his bloodstream with expensive cognac—an elegant praxis—and it worked. In the winter of 1935, “Death took the polishing tool from his hands,” as one of Schmidt’s colleagues
wrote, referring to Schmidt’s “hands” in the plural, seeming to forget that Schmidt only had one hand. They buried him in the same cemetery that he and Walter Baade had photographed while testing the first Schmidt telescope. It is the Neuer Friedhof cemetery in Bergedorf, near Hamburg. If you happen to visit that graveyard, I recommend that you turn through the right-hand door at the main entrance of the cemetery and follow a ring path until you reach a magnolia. You will now be standing among the very tombs from which Baade and Schmidt took first light. There you will find
der Optiker
’s own grave, which is a dark headstone engraved only with his name, a star, and the words
PER ASPERA AD ASTRA
.

In 1931, Walter Baade joined the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, bringing with him the photograph of the tombstone that he and Schmidt had taken, as well as some photographs of the night sky. These greatly impressed George Ellery Hale and everyone who saw them, including a Caltech physicist by the name of Fritz Zwicky. Soon afterward, Zwicky collaborated with Walter Baade in a great discovery—they found that stars can explode with extreme violence. They used the word
supernova
to describe the explosion. Fritz Zwicky longed to watch a supernova go off. A supernova is a rare event, and Zwicky realized that he would be unlikely to see a supernova anytime soon inside the Milky Way, but he figured that with a wide-field telescope he could monitor a large number of galaxies and perhaps thereby raise his chances of seeing the gleam of a supernova. A Schmidt telescope would be perfect for a supernova search. Construction of the two-hundred-inch telescope had barely begun on Palomar Mountain, but Zwicky began badgering opticians and engineers at the Mount Wilson Observatory and at Caltech to build him a telescope. The result was the eighteen-inch Schmidt telescope, or Little Eye, now used by the Shoemakers to search for comets and asteroids. Russell Porter, who styled some of the details on the Hale dome, designed the eighteen-inch telescope’s aerodynamic lines.

First light hit the mirror of the Little Eye in 1936, when Fritz Zwicky began photographing swarms of galaxies in Virgo, hoping
to catch an exploding star. He had luck. He found supernovas popping off in galaxies all over the sky. Zwicky’s eighteen-inch Schmidt was the first telescope on Palomar Mountain, and the only one there for the next twelve years, until the Hale Telescope went into operation.

In 1947, the forty-eight-inch Palomar Schmidt Telescope saw first light. This telescope was Walter Baade’s jewel. He had supervised its construction. It had a corrector glass of exactly the largest size that Bernhard Schmidt had said would work, that summer afternoon in Bergedorf. When Baade’s telescope went into operation, Zwicky’s little Schmidt dropped into obscurity inside a thicket of carrasco oaks, and Zwicky began to feel ignored by his colleagues and especially by the press. He began to feel that the other astronomers, Baade in particular, did not want him to use the Hale Telescope. Zwicky probably did not help his requests for time on the Hale when one night, when he was working at the forty-eight-inch Schmidt, he ordered a night assistant to hurl a series of cherry bombs out of the dome, hoping that the explosions would improve the seeing. The seeing did not improve, but the noise and flashes, which made it sound as if Zwicky had started a war near his telescope, did not encourage the other astronomers to let him use the Big Eye.

Zwicky began to remark loudly that
he
had built the first Schmidt telescope. Baade reminded Zwicky that Bernhard Schmidt had. Zwicky became irritated with his former collaborator, Walter Baade. Zwicky began referring to Baade as “the Nazi.” That was a cruel joke. Baade was an excitable, rather delicate man, with pointed ears and a bow tie. He limped badly—one of his legs was a good deal shorter than the other—and he stuttered. He was no Nazi. His hands trembled from nervousness, giving some of his colleagues the impression that he was about to come apart at the seams. Yet somehow whenever Baade took the guide paddle of a telescope in his hands, all the shaking stopped, as if Baade were transfixed at the sight of his guide star in the way that a deer can be jacked in a flashlight beam; and then Baade took masterful photographs of star fields that were as fine as powdered talc.

Zwicky had his own ideas about how to photograph a galaxy: he thought that photographic emulsions should be mixed with
explosive chemicals. That way you could point the telescope at a galaxy, open the shutter, and you would hear a little frying sound and a pop inside the telescope when the light hit the film, causing it to explode—now that was what you called a fast film. Zwicky was a maximal space freak. In the early days of rocketry, Zwicky put an explosive charge on the nose of a German V-2 rocket, and when the rocket had reached the top of its trajectory, Zwicky triggered the charge, which fired a scrap of metal off into deep space. Zwicky was proud of that because he, Fritz Zwicky, had sent the first human artifact into escape velocity from the earth. Zwicky held some fifty patents, including one for an underwater ramjet that he called the hydrobomb. He regarded most of the other Palomar astronomers as fools, and Walter Baade as a cretin. Zwicky, who had been born in Bulgaria but raised in Switzerland, believed that he was superior to the others not only mentally but physically. He tried to demonstrate this by doing one-armed push-ups on the floor of the Caltech Athenaeum, a posh dining room on the Caltech campus. There the faculty ate filet mignon and reasoned with one another on scientific topics—and on at least one occasion collectively stopped their forks midway to their mouths while they watched Fritz Zwicky flop to the floor like a bull seal and in a grunty, roaring Swisso-Bulgaric accent, challenge anyone to beat him at one-armed push-ups. The Palomar astronomers could not get rid of Zwicky—he had tenure at Caltech—but they consulted psychiatrists to see if he was edging into psychosis, and the outlook must not have been favorable, because Walter Baade grew physically afraid of Zwicky.

It was not difficult to feel afraid of Fritz Zwicky. He had a glowering flat face, pale blue eyes, and a savage sense of humor. He would swear torrentially at night assistants, using scientific terms laced with obscenities. He referred to Baade and the others as spherical bastards—“They are spherical,” he said, “because they are bastards every way I look at them.”

Zwicky was, in fact, a true genius, and one of the greatest minds at Caltech, although his personality kept him in deep trouble with his colleagues, some of whom clearly hated him. He made many discoveries. His most prophetic happened in 1933. Studying the motions of galaxies in the Coma cluster, which is a cluster of
galaxies fairly near the Milky Way, Zwicky realized that these galaxies were moving abnormally quickly around their cluster. The galaxies were moving so fast that the whole cluster should fly apart. But obviously the cluster was not flying apart. He concluded that some kind of powerful, unseen gravitational force was holding the cluster together. He did not know what it was, so he called it the missing mass. For many years astronomers tried not to think about Zwicky’s missing-mass problem (one tried not to think about Zwicky at all), until recently, when astronomers finally could not deny that the universe really does contain large amounts of unseen mass. They now call it the dark matter. And it is a very big problem. They do not know what the stuff is, although they do know that it makes up as much as 99 percent of the universe. In other words, astronomers do not know what most of the universe is made of; and Fritz Zwicky told them so. His discovery of the missing mass is probably the most important problem in modern astronomy. After all, it would be nice to know what the universe is largely made of.

Zwicky used to say, “Only Galileo and I really knew how to use a small telescope.” According to one astronomer who knew Zwicky, Zwicky seemed to fill up more space than he actually occupied, as if he himself contained missing mass; and Zwicky fully occupied the little dome, slamming the eighteen-inch telescope around, allegedly putting dents on its tube while he looked for exploding stars. Walter Baade began to wonder what would happen if Zwicky went mad. What if he burst out of the little dome and came around to the Hale Telescope one night looking for Walter Baade—and not with any telescope, either? Hands shaking, Baade whispered to colleagues that he believed Zwicky was going to murder him.

Rumors that Fritz Zwicky was on the verge of murdering Walter Baade got around. During dinners at the Monastery, Baade and Zwicky sat at opposite ends of the table, where they did not speak to each other and hardly to anyone else, although Zwicky’s pale eyes flicked in Baade’s direction, giving some of the diners the need to take an antacid. An astronomer named Milton Humason was often present during those dinners. Humason had begun his career as a janitor and a mule driver on Mount Wilson, and had been promoted to astronomer. Humason had collaborated with
Edwin Hubble on the discovery of the redshift of the galaxies and thus of the expansion of the universe, one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century. Humason was a short, humble man who wore a Chicago-style felt hat and a heavy coat that generally came equipped with a pint of Jack Daniel’s somewhere in the coat, for extra protection against substellar cold. Milton Humason was regarded as the kindliest of the astronomers on Palomar Mountain, but Humason had been around mules long enough to know when to draw the line. One night at dinner, Zwicky gave the final proof that he had gone mad. Zwicky said in a loud voice that a rocket ought to be fired at the moon in order to recover moon rocks for study.

“Aww, Fritz!” Humason rumbled. “Leave the goddam moon to the lovers!”

Walter Baade retired to Germany, where he died of natural causes. Fritz Zwicky continued to work at Caltech into the 1970s. He ended up in a basement office in the Robinson building on the Caltech campus, down among the astronomy graduate students. Watching them pass by his office, every once in a while Zwicky would roar out, “Who in the hell are you?” He died in 1974. The asteroids named Zwicky and Baade drift in the Main Belt today and are not likely to collide with each other anytime soon.

The Shoemakers decided to take a break for coffee and apples. They walked over to the dome slit and looked at the sky, which had developed into one of those autumn nights when the stars grow needle-sharp, immanent.

“Andromeda galaxy’s up,” Gene said. “Right at the top of the sky.”

“I can never find it, Gene.”

They both leaned out of the dome slit, silhouetted against the Milky Way. “Look at the Horn of Plenty,” he said.

“Got it.”

“See the mouth of the Horn?”

“Sure.”

“Two stars near the end. Now go up from those two stars—”

“Which way?” she asked.

“That way. See a diffuse patch? Andromeda galaxy’s bigger than the full moon.”

“Oh! It looks different, Gene.”

“What? We’ve been looking at it in the guide scope.”

“Well, it looks different from here.”

Gene turned around and propped his elbows on the ledge of the dome and bit his apple. “What a beauty of a night,” he said.